The Case of the General's Thumb

On page 92, the author writes: "He was beginning to tire of the whole thing." What is true for that character will be true for many readers. This social satire/espionage caper, set in Ukraine and Russia and written by Andrey Kurkov, is in perpetual motion, eventually whirling its way up its own arse.

On the Edge

It is too easy to satirize phony gurus (are there any other kind?), so what Edward St. Aubyn does in this novel is better: He blends his characters' often sincere striving for enlightenment with their more earthly goals (the pursuit of a woman, for example), while throwing jabs here and there at New Age nostrums. To the author's credit, the line between charlatan and second coming of Seneca is not always obvious.

The Great Gatsby

Reading Gatsby now, knowing its story and themes, I am able to appreciate more fully Fitzgerald's gorgeous writing. When for example Nick understands, in Chapter 4, Gatsby's aim — in a word, Daisy — there is this: "He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor." I cannot imagine a more perfect sentence. There is imagery, metaphor, alliteration (the p's in "purposeless splendor"), rhythm, elegance, simplicity, and a furtherance of plot. All in fourteen words!

It is interesting that two books published in 1925, this one and Manhattan Transfer, perhaps best capture the New York of the Jazz Age and yet are so different stylistically. Fitzgerald, unlike Dos Passos, does nothing radical here, but what he does is as good as it's ever been done.

The 500

Robert Harris is the among the best writers of thrillers and historical fiction. His recent The Fear Index was, typically for him, smart and exciting. Matthew Quirk enters the field with The 500, which is neither all that smart nor very exciting. The action makes sense only in the most basic ways -- yes, that character could have crawled under that porch and listened to two people talking above him -- but very little of it is believable. This is due to poor writing and a lack of organic development. Given this same plot outline, Harris could have produced, as they say on the flaps, a ripping yarn.

Max and the Cats

I have not read Life of Pi, whose author lifted the idea from this short novel by Moacyr Scliar, but I doubt it could be as effective, and affecting, as the original. Scliar spins fables that, far from seeming outlandish, hum with verisimilitude. The line between truth and illusion has rarely been so brilliantly blurred.

Everything You Know

Zoe Heller reminds me of Mordecai Richer. Her novels are sharp and funny, and her sentences flow smooth as a mountain stream, with always the right words in perfect rhythm. Her characters, enormously flawed, teeter on the edge of caricature but never quite fall in. Her novels' poignancy is wrapped inside humor, which makes it all the more affecting.

The Man Within My Head

Pico Iyer's writing style is not felicitous. He often approaches his subject crabwise, backing into his points and putting too many words between subject and verb. And this book, which makes connections between the author and Graham Greene, the "man within his head," has the added defect of being repetitive. All that aside, this is an interesting study, more of Greene than of Iyer, that gives an appetite to read, or re-read, the novels of the conflicted voluptuary.

They Eat Puppies, Don't They?

For a country as big as the United States, there seems to be a shortage of satirical political fiction. I can't think of anyone in the field other than Christopher Buckley. This novel is a quick read and mildly entertaining, certainly nothing approaching Waugh or even Mordecai Richler in terms of style or humor. Its mustiness will put some readers in mind of 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies.

The Lawgiver

The doubts Back to Blood prompted about an old writer's ability to connect with contemporary life have been overturned, at least for today, by this epistolary novel by Herman Wouk, age 97. Consisting of faxes, e-mails, Skype transcripts, notes, and text messages, The Lawgiver revolves around an Australian billionaire's attempt to produce an epic film of the life of Moses. Wouk places himself in the cast of characters, struggling in Palm Springs to write his own long-desired novel on the subject. The workings of Hollywood, religion, and love are mashed together in a funny, vibrant stew.

Drop

I heard about Mat Johnson through the Dos Passos Prize, which he won and which is named for one of my favorite writers. This novel, Drop, would have found favor, I think, with that earlier author, whose Manhattan Transfer was described by a contemporary as an "explosion in a sewer." In Drop there is an almost literal explosion in a toilet. The sights and sounds of rough Philadelphia, its crazy and desperate people, come alive in Johnson's deft similes and piquant descriptions that sometimes veer into verse. The narrator, young but not so young, finds his talent in advertising and strikes out for London. His adventures and misadventures result in the first truly surprising ending I've read in a novel in recent memory.

Back to Blood

I've always enjoyed Tom Wolfe's writing and, with the exception of a short piece here and there, I've read all of it. His new novel, alas, demonstrates that he has lost it. Back to Blood is a series of researched, fictionalized anecdotes carried out by plywood characters. No matter how mightily Wolfe labors to breathe life into these people, they do not live. If this book were cleared of Wolfe's tics and presented as an anonymous work, I doubt anyone would publish it. There are many embarrassing moments showing that this 81-year-old man, no matter how many guided tours he takes, cannot capture contemporary experience. A character "iPhones" someone else, a usage I've never heard once. In one scene, a doctor supposedly carries out a "takedown" of a 60 Minutes reporter. But the interview shows nothing of the kind. The "Grand Inquisitor" is reduced to a mumbling mess, but the doctor has done next to nothing to demolish him. The scene falls utterly flat.

Throughout, there is a mixture of sawdust stuffing ("It was lunchtime, and students were coming out of the building and heading here and going there") and cluelessness ("Nestor happened to look at the big glass case he was beside -- and what the hell was that? Those shelves didn't just have pastries and cookies, they had wrapped up foods..."). The second quote is from a scene in which a 25-year-old policeman is supposed to be flabbergasted by his first trip to a Starbucks.

In Hooking Up, published in 2000, Wolfe was already lost. The "trends" he cited there were either over, peripheral, or nonexistent. Since then he's only fallen further behind. Back to Blood is a sad denouement to a worthy career. Or, as the saying goes, there's no fool like an old fool.

The Art of Fielding

This is a novel with the weight and IQ of a doorstop. A blurb from the execrable Jonathan Franzen should have been the tipoff. Nothing here is believable; no character emerges into three dimensions. To give the author credit, some of the dialogue begins to veer toward the credible along about page 250. But the Spider-Man comics of my youth in the mid-1970s were more complex and better written — by far.

Roadside Picnic

It is unlikely I would have picked up this Russian novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky had it not been the basis for the 1979 film Stalker. In the event, I am glad I did. As the useful foreword explains, this is not the science fiction of generals and geniuses, but of real people, principally the "stalker" Red Schuhart. That an alien civilization would visit Earth and then leave, possibly bored, is the type of contact story not often told. The humans are left to blunder through the items left behind, like animals encountering the remains of a roadside picnic. They reach blindly for understanding, with no tools but a puny intelligence and a living soul.

Candy

Banned smut with artistic pretensions will always attract a crowd, and the "scandalous" Candy, co-authored by Terry Southern, attracted a crowd of some 3 million readers after a Paris edition was reissued in the United States. Many of them, I suspect, eagerly fingered the pages looking for the dirty parts, which include anatomical terminology and some clumsy sex scenes. Southern's novel Blue Movie and his work in film make you wonder how he could have produced this satirical dreck.

Man Made

Joel Stein's book, subtitled A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, is deadpan, self-deprecating, and very funny. It also provides unexpected moments of insight as he endures military training, goes on calls with firefighters, and, perhaps most hilariously, hunts turkeys, among other pursuits. Stein's humor thankfully lacks snark, and his reporting puts the reader in mind of The Pump House Gang and other earlier classics.

The Happy Hypocrite

Max Beerbohm's 63-page story, first published in 1896, is described on the dust jacket as "a golden butterfly, done by Whistler." It is a skillfully constructed miniature about a vile, boozing English lord who woos a pure maiden by putting on a saintly mask. The ending has the rare quality of being both surprising and seeming in hindsight to have been inevitable. The fine prose puts one in mind, on the American side, of James Branch Cabell.

The Master of Go

There are passages in this novel by Yasunari Kawabata of poignant insight as a game of Go between the "invincible Master" and his young challenger unfolds amid the ebbing of an old, aristocratic Japan. The reportage upon which the novel is based, however, can take over the narrative. The hotel arrangements, match delays, health issues, and other practical matters are given in great detail. For a game as symbol, I prefer the approach of Nabokov in The Defense.

Blue Nights

In Joan Didion's world, there are nothing but exemplary people and status markers. Natasha Richardson  didn't just cook; she "did a perfect buerre blanc." When Didion's daughter wed, the cake came from Payard. The whole work is dusted with brand names. Everything is pitched upward, is unassailable. The clueless intellectual is a stock figure, but he exists. I think of Edmund Wilson not being able to figure out a checkbook and getting taken for all his money late in life. In Didion's case, a loose baby tooth might require a trip to the emergency room. Drilling into everything with a colossal intellect, she comes up with dust.

Dropped Names

The quality of this memoir by Frank Langella is derived from the quality of his interlocutors. It rises above Hollywood tittle-tattle because many of the actors and others presented have intellectual heft, a wicked sense of humor, or an obnoxious personality — and sometimes all three. It seems inevitable when reading anything remotely honest about show business to conclude that actors are sad, sad people.

The Centaur in the Garden

If only all magical realism were as effective as this novel by Moacyr Scliar, a tale of the centaur son of Jews chased from Russia to Brazil in the 1930s. What makes it work is an emphasis on realism with a light touch of the magical. The reader will not doubt the existence of the centaur. Even if the thoughtful treatment of themes of alienation, love, and faith was absent, that fact alone should earn the novel high praise.

And Even Now

This 1921 volume of essays by Max Beerbohm is pure pleasure. In it, among other things, he: investigates why a statue of King Umberto in Italy is cloaked; imagines the fate of an anonymous clergyman who dared to speak to Dr. Johnson and was cut to the quick; burns a novel by a woman who annoyed him; watches a boy build a house in the sand and then delight in its destruction; imagines a missing, vast portrait of Goethe and speculates on why it was never finished; and much else. What Beerbohm can do so well is to bring his erudition and felicitous writing style to bear on any number of subjects, and then spin out the piece with his creative imagination. There are a few misses here, primarily those essays in which he sets himself up as the schoolmaster, but much more often the arrows find their targets.

When That Rough God Goes Riding

Greil Marcus, who writes in a labyrinthine, showoff style, is at his best in this book (subtitled Listening to Van Morrison) when he excavates songs from the 1968 album Astral Weeks. He unpacks the lyrics, digs into the emotions, and charts the musicians' interplay. Too often, though, the work is gauzy and tentative. It is also marred by unaccountable errors, including misidentifying a song title (Linden Arden is given as "Linden Arlen") and a person (Haji Akbar, who appears on an album cover, is called Pee Wee Ellis). Marcus's dismissal of 17 years of Morrison's output, from 1980 to 1997, is also wrong, but he at least makes an interesting case.

Bluebeard

This short Max Frisch novel, his last, is titled after a 17th century French fable about a nobleman who murders his wives. In Frisch's tale, a physician in his mid-50s is acquitted of killing his sixth wife. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that "not guilty" is not the same as "innocent." The story is told mostly in dialogue among the doctor, prosecutor, and witnesses. It reads in a flash, accompanied by visions of the stage play it could easily become.

Panama

This 1978 novel by Thomas McGuane revels a little too much in its outrageousness. By the end of the first chapter, a character has snorted cocaine off the sidewalk, masturbated in a grocery store toilet, and nailed his hand to a door. Yet there is some crackling and funny writing here, like the line describing a character who "looks like a circus performer who's been shot out of the cannon one too many times." McGuane also delivers a colorful portrait of a raucous Key West. Critics savaged McGuane for this one, which he considered his best. For me, it falls into the category of interesting books that will never be re-read.

Billiards at Half Past Nine

This novel marks another landmark in Heinrich Boll's mapping of the German soul. It is notable that the words "Nazi" and "Hitler" almost never appear in these books, which nonetheless excavate the times and thoughts of a nation with an archaeologist's care. What constantly impresses is how Boll can paint good and evil in such subtle colorings that are at the same time brilliantly vivid.

A Soldier's Legacy

Reading this Heinrich Boll short novel immediately after Across is like escaping from a fetid room into fresh air and sunshine. It's not that the subject matter of A Soldier's Legacy is pleasant. It is anything but. It's just that Boll is a writer who exudes, along with wisdom, humanity and modesty and the kind of gentle irony last seen in the books of Anatole France.

Across

I'm calling off the Peter Handke attempt. He is simply too arid, academic and, as the English say, "up his own arse" to bother with further. This one is all alienation and angst, touched up with some Kafka. The endless similes and numbing descriptions of nature make it virtually unreadable.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Carlo Levi's account of his political banishment to southern Italy in the mid-1930s reveals a region grindingly poor and full of ancient hatreds and superstitions. Levi, from Turin, is at his best in describing the brutal landscape and colorful characters of the small town of his exile. He neither gratuitously ennobles the peasantry nor blindly castigates the authorities. His honesty and frankness, as well as an elegant style, have rightly earned for this work the status of a modern classic.

Group Portrait With Lady

This novel by Heinrich Boll is a stupendous achievement. Framed as an investigation by an unnamed Author into the life of Leni Pfeiffer, nee Gruyten, born in 1922 and widowed three times by the end of World War II, it encompasses through her circle of family, friends, lovers, and rivals an entire universe of the German wartime experience. The liberating Americans thought the population could be neatly divided into Nazis and anti-Nazis. As Boll shows, paint stroke by paint stroke over 400 pages, the reality was much more complex, and human. A tone of gentle bemusement ensures that, despite the stark subject, the portrait is never too dark. I found myself imagining all the characters' qualities and actions as individual daubs of paint on a vast canvas, with Leni, radiant, in the center. This is a glorious, deeply affecting work of art.

Without Blood

At 87 pages in a large typeface with wide margins, this fable by Alessandro Baricco will not give the satisfaction of a novel. The tale of a girl who witnesses her family's political killing and survives to confront the remaining assailant a half-century later is a slender reed upon which not much can be made to hang.

The Dinner

Dutch author Herman Koch's The Dinner is an international hit, just published in Britain and headed to America in February. Over several courses, the narrator does a suspenseful job of peeling back the onion on two couples, their children, and some awful behavior. What price happiness? To get to the sweet, you sometimes have to choke down the bitter.

Why Read?

Mark Edmundson answers the question of his book's title by first rejecting the detached, sneering, ironic and obscurantist tilt of university teaching. He then affirms that literature can be harnessed to live a better life. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that novels at their best give readers a chance to experience a more concentrated, intense existence. Edmundson puts that to practical use.

What Jesus Meant

After reading Garry Wills on Jesus, I've concluded that the Martin Mull song Jesus Is Easy gets it exactly backwards. Mull sings: "Jesus is easy, just get down on your knees, he's going to listen to your every prayer." But the Jesus of the Gospels as explicated by Wills is anything but easy. His demands are comprehensive. His opposition to wealth, insistence on loving one's enemies and the most wretched, his demand for love above all -- there is nothing easy there for those who want to follow him. Mull may have been parodying the televangelists, in which case: bingo. Reading Wills reminds me of the line (I forget whose) that if Jesus were to return today and see what is being done in his name he would never stop throwing up.

Life at the Top

When we left Joe Lampton, at the end of John Braine's novel Room at the Top, he had clawed his way to the high life by marrying the boss's daughter. Ten years later, in Life at the Top, he has two children, is still working for the odious father-in-law, is still dissatisfied, and continues to have trouble keeping his zipper up. There is a soap opera quality to parts of this novel; Graham Greene would have called it an "entertainment" (and done it better). But it must be admitted that Braine's prose is congenial and his scenes at their best have a vivid, cinematic quality.

Portraits from Life

The pleasures of this book of literary profiles: Ford Madox Ford's fine writing, his talent for anecdote, and his clear-eyed literary assessments. As a bonus, the reader is directed to books he might have overlooked, such as W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions, and ones he should revisit, such as The Red Badge of Courage.

But Beautiful

By the time the reader gets to the chapter on Art Pepper and finds him face down in his own vomit, he will have had quite enough of Geoff Dyer's half-invented biographical sketches of jazz musicians. Which works out well, since Pepper is the last in the series and is followed by a much more useful general essay about jazz's history and meaning. Dyer is fixated on the drugs and drinking and suffering of artists like Bud Powell and Chet Baker because he believes that from this pain comes the beauty of the music. But he soon begins to sound like a sad voyeur.

Clean Young Englishman

The honesty, if that is what it is, of John Gale's account of his upbringing, travels as a reporter, and episodes of madness permits little of the self serving that pollutes too many memoirs. "'Damn me if I haven't wound up in the nuthouse,' I thought," he writes near the end about his confinement at age 34, in 1959. A manic depressive, he was released after undergoing electroshock treatment. The horrors he witnessed reporting the Algerian war could not have left him unscathed, a result all the more poignant given the apparent clear sailing of his life up till then.

Inez

This late, short novel by Carlos Fuentes is too gauzy for my taste; a little Ibero-American magical realism goes a long way. The two plot strands feature a Faust conductor and his diva and a prehistory couple at the time of an ascending patriarchy. I suspect the strands complement and reinforce each other, but frankly I couldn't be bothered to put it all together.

Mr. Peanut

Adam Ross's debut novel succeeds on several counts. It is eventful; things happen, surprises even, unlike in much of contemporary fiction, especially work from MFAs or the Iowa school. It is written in a graceful style, pleasing to the ear, that doesn't call undue attention to itself. Finally, it is put together like a puzzle box. The line between love and death is thrown into sharp relief.

Small Memories

With Jose Saramago (1922-2010), I begin at the end, which is also his beginning. The autobiographical Small Memories is the first of his books I've read; it's among the last he wrote; and it covers his childhood. "Luminous" is a word that appears on too many dust jackets, but there isn't a better word to describe the opening pages of this brief memoir. Even when it settles in to a more matter-of-fact account of Saramago's childhood, Small Memories is studded with poetical hooks that catch the reader. The use of long parentheticals, generally an annoyance, here takes on a conversational aspect that is entirely pleasing. I will have to move forward and go back into Saramago's earlier works.

Anatomy of Injustice

Raymond Bonner's account of a mildly retarded man convicted in 1982 of a murder he did not commit and sentenced to death is sobering, especially as the rest of the Western world abolished capital punishment decades ago. Bonner cites a Supreme Court opinion from the 1930s that sets a standard that is ignored at a nation's peril: It is not victory at all costs that prosecutors must seek, but justice. For me, the best arguments for abolition are still to be found in Arthur Koestler's Reflections on Hanging.

Hooking Up

It is odd that the title essay in this collection by Tom Wolfe, which describes America at the turn of the millennium, seems musty and stale only a dozen years after publication, while Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (recently re-read) still comes off fresh as morning. The easy explanation is that Dos Passos is a far superior writer. Where Dos Passos collects facts and synthesizes, Wolfe collects facts and shows them off. The best things in this collection are two essays: on the microchip inventors, and on the "three stooges" who attacked Wolfe's A Man in Full.

Me and Kaminski

A new author to watch: Daniel Kehlmann, whose novel I picked up on a hunch at Dollar Tree. He's not as interesting as Bernhard and not as deep as Frisch, but this breezy book about a bumbling journalist, an elderly artist, and their picaresque adventures is sharp and at times very funny. His big seller, Measuring the World, looks good and is on my list.

The Song of Roland

Action, treachery, bravery, and greed are the elements of a ripping yarn, and the author whose name is lost to history cooked all of these into The Song of Roland, an account of the betrayal of Charlemagne's army and the valiant death in battle at the hands of the Saracens of his beloved Roland. The "clash of civilizations," much threatened today, comes to life in eighth century France and Spain. To keep the excitement going, there are popping eyeballs, spilled brains, and "pagans" being split in half vertically by jewel-encrusted swords.

Remembering Laughter

Aside from hearing of the title Angle of Repose, my knowledge of Wallace Stegner was null before picking up this short novel from 1938, his first. Featuring hidden family pain and written in clean, evocative prose, the story succeeds and will, I suspect, linger in the memory.

Rabbit, Run

On page 7 of this novel, John Updike uses the adjective "crisscrossing." On page 14, he uses it again. I think it was too soon, but maybe it was intentional. I have a hard time believing it was laziness. Updike can be annoying in the way he pumps out a gusher of adjectives, and more than once I found his metaphors strained, or odd. But then he comes out with a pure, beautiful sentence like this one on page 81: "In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature." And far from being annoyed at the use of the same adjective -- twice in the space of five words, no less -- you are stunned.

Nineteen Nineteen

The second volume of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy immerses the reader in the non-military world of the Great War era. The conflict intrudes on the fictional characters in ways that manage to be both realistic and intensified, while some of the biographies, Paxton Hibben's for example, rescue important figures from obscurity. If there was such a thing as a time machine with an all-seeing intelligence to provide commentary, it could not do much better than Nineteen Nineteen.

Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson's tales of hopes, desires, and agonies in Middle America retain their power nearly a century after they marked out a new territory in the national literature. If, as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, writers obtain true originality through extraordinary sincerity, "by daring to give everything of themselves," then Anderson qualifies as an original.

Zona

Zona is Geoff Dyer's appreciation of the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. As in his other nonfiction books, Dyer illuminates the subject by making connections between it and passingly related works or experiences. An account of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks, for example, also describes a leaky, ominous tunnel in the 1979 film: "The darkness grew loud with the sound of falling water, which turned out to be bands of mysterious subterranean rain ... falling from the confusion of ruin overhead." To hear Dyer tell it, cinema was invented to allow this film to be made. But if his claims stretch too far, or he takes a personal detour that seems odd, most readers will not mind. Such is the latitude given a great stylist.

The 42nd Parallel

In an introductory note to the 1937 Modern Library edition of this novel, John Dos Passos explains that the content of a novel determines its form. The content of U.S.A., of which The 42nd Parallel is the first book, is the whole of America in the first third of the 20th century; the form is intersecting personal narratives threaded with news clippings, bits of songs, mini-biographies of important figures, and stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye sections following the author's own experiences. The techniques have lost none of their power in depicting small people struggling against large powers. The much-bruited Great American Novel was written between 1930 and 1936 in three volumes: It is called U.S.A.

Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

Edward Behr sets up his enormously entertaining and perceptive account of his years as a foreign correspondent with two foundational statements: laughter is never gratuitous, and the best reporters' stories are told in barrooms, not in print. From dinner with Mao to pissing next to Churchill, Behr was seemingly everywhere during a career that began shortly after World War II. The Algerian war, Vietnam, the partition of India and much more besides are covered with a rich store of anecdotes. (The book's title, which was changed for an American edition against the author's wishes, refers to a particularly crass British reporter's question shouted at refugees leaving a plane in Congo.)

The Silent Angel

Heinrich Boll's first novel (after his novella The Train Was On Time) was suppressed in Germany in the early 1950s and not published until several years after his death in 1985. The traumas of a defeated nation were still too fresh, despite the fact that The Silent Angel has virtually no wartime content. Instead it tells of a man's search for bread, an identity, and some human comfort in the ruins of Cologne in May 1945. Boll makes a powerful and austere statement of universal value.

The Miraculous Barber

Satire and irony are harder than they look. Done well, like in Anatole France's books, the effects seem effortless. The Miraculous Barber by 20th century French author Marcel Ayme is an example of a more thudding, juvenile kind of satire. The characters are cutouts consisting of one or two attributes, which is why there are so many of them. The bawdy humor must have been funny to someone, sometime, but has aged poorly.

The Believers

When a writer you enjoy dies, you're left to go through the works again (and maybe again), hoping that your earlier enthusiasm is not diluted by the subsequent readings. That is the case with Mordecai Richler, and I have been happy to find that his novels and essays are just as rewarding the second (or third) time around. But what can also happen is that a living writer can bring some of the same type of enjoyment, which is what Zoe Heller does in this novel.

The Believers is a family drama, with comedic and cruel accents, set in New York in 2002. The family patriarch, a prominent left-wing lawyer, has a stroke, and his family goes on (or stumbles) without him. The caustic wife, Audrey, is the source of much of the bitterly funny dialogue, which has echoes of Richler and even Waugh. Heller's prose has perfect rhythm, and her metaphors and similes strike home. I can't recall a single bad sentence in the whole book.

Chavs

In many ways, Chavs examines from the left the issues Charles Murray tackles from the right in Coming Apart. "Chav" is derogatory British slang for a poor person, especially one who is idle, tasteless, and prone to drink and mischief. Author Owen Jones attacks this stereotype and sympathizes with the working classes who have had their lives cut out from under them by the loss of manufacturing and mining in Britain. It is clear that a terrible price has been paid and that government policies can make things worse for the poor, but the structural changes Jones laments happened decades ago and globalization is not going away. In tilting at windmills, Jones too often presents the working class as a lump of labor through which only others can work their will.

The Hunger Games

I've read a lot worse.

The Third Policeman

It is worth remembering now and then that the word "novel" means new, original. So many books fall well short of that definition, but Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman hits the mark. The book, a mixture of fantasy, philosophy and science, with a kind of mystery thrown in, succeeds in being unique without being annoying. It is also quite funny.

An Improvised Life

This memoir by Alan Arkin is more about his journey of learning to act (which continues to this day) than about his personal life or Hollywood gossip. Central to Arkin's approach is improvisation, which, unlike the common perception, does not necessarily mean comedy or one-upping other actors with clever quips. Arkin has a clean, intelligent writing style and an admirable modesty.

The Magician

This 1908 novel by Somerset Maugham was his last work published before the much more ambitious and popular Of Human Bondage. It is melodramatic, filled with people talking "hoarsely" and "in agony" as they encounter the diabolical Oliver Haddo, a fictional stand-in for notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. It is slightly overheated but reliably entertaining.

A Variety of Things

This collection by Max Beerbohm is another example of how wandering around stacks of books can lead to unexpected pleasures and the opening of new doors. I bought the book carelessly, thinking it was by the Bohemian poet Maxwell Bodenheim, who was on my mind for some reason. (I had recently bought a Ben Hecht book that parodied him, and seemed to remember that Bodenheim was murdered.) Beerbohm (1872-1956) is another kettle of fish, I have since learned: dandy, caricaturist, writer and friend of Wilde and other literary lights. This collection includes a prehistoric fable about a dragon with echoes of Cabell, essays on Aubrey Beardsley and Venice, a play, and assorted other pieces. Beerbohm's work evokes the gentle irony of Anatole France and the elegance of Waugh. As Beerbohm himself writes in one of the pieces, humor is a matter of fashion, and fashions come and go; but wit, "being a hard and clean-cut thing, is always good as new." This collection is good as new.

The Missing of the Somme

I seem to remember an introduction by Somerset Maugham to one of his nonfiction books in which he said he might not be qualified to write what followed, having read only one hundred or so books on the subject. Geoff Dyer, in this short book on how the Great War is remembered, as with his other nonfiction, gives the impression of having read everything necessary on the subject. His talent is to incorporate, synthesize, and, especially, intensify. Part travelogue, part literary essay, part architectural history — Dyer defies pat genres and displays a gorgeous prose style.

At the Book Fair

Spent $40 for five titles at the annual book fair, all for reading:

• A Variety of Things by Max Beerbohm. I confused Beerbohm with Max Bodenheim, but on later reading that Evelyn Waugh admired Beerbohm's writing, I look forward to this one.
• The Miraculous Barber by Marcel Ayme. Had never heard of this French writer. "The best satirical novel since Anatole France ..." on the rear jacket sold me.
• Droll Stories by Balzac. A Modern Library edition. 
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A new translation published by Everyman's Library.
• Group Portrait With Lady by Heinrich Boll. Sharp copy in DJ of a large novel.

I think if I stopped buying books now, I might just be able to finish reading what I'd like to before my eternal rest.

I Curse the River of Time

The appeal of Norwegian writer Per Petterson has evaporated. This novel is diffuse and soft, with numbing descriptions of street layouts and slanting sunlight. Without much in the way of ideas to hang itself on, the prose simply dissolves.

Memories of the Ford Administration

This John Updike novel is old-fashioned and richly descriptive, each sentence chiseled with care. Having read virtually nothing of his work, I had expected to find spare, arid prose a la DeLillo or Roth. Instead this novel is baroque in its ornamentation as it switches between a junior college professor's imagined life of James Buchanan, 15th president, and the professor's own messy life during the Ford years.

Epilogue

It is not surprising that a newly widowed woman would be dour; it is surprising that this woman, a writer named Anne Roiphe, would think that a memoir of 214 pages of present-tense dourness is worth enduring. The ham-fisted wordplay doesn't help: "I remember the Ezra Pound poem: Faces on the subway like petals on a branch. But the faces are not like petals, they are more like bicycle pedals, worn, dark, shadowed, concealing their histories behind a veneer of dust and soot."

The Clown

Heinrich Boll's novel reminded me in places of Graham Greene: the concern for Catholicism, the sensitive protagonist, his isolation. As a portrait of postwar Germany it isn't pretty; as a portrait of the human soul (in conflict with itself, as Faulkner said) it is exquisitely sad.

Coming Apart

Charles Murray makes a game effort at the end of this devastating account of America's decline to postulate a way out, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it. At bottom, the problem is a literal one of breeding: The upper classes, mostly college-educated and civilized, are reproducing among themselves in de facto segregated zip codes; meanwhile, the pathologies of the lower orders — crime, bastardy, joblessness — are only getting worse. And there is no end in sight. Or, perhaps more accurately for what Murray calls the "American project," there is indeed an end in sight.

The Fear Index

Robert Harris's historical fictions on Cicero and Pompeii commended to me this present-day gothic tale about hedge fund algorithms gone berserk. The novel takes place over 24 hours in Geneva, and such is the author's skill that I doubt most readers will take much longer than that to finish it.

Concrete

Thomas Bernhard's extravagant misanthropy, gift for aphorism, and luxuriant pessimism come into bloom in this 1982 novel about a musicologist whose attempt to write the definitive work on Mendelssohn becomes this biographical screed instead. It is not without its flashes of humanity and tenderness; some light finds its way through cracks in the concrete.

Public Enemies

The philosophy can be heavy sledding, but the biographical and literary discussions lighten the load in this exchange of letters between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Levy.

Garden, Ashes

This largely plotless, biographical novel by Danilo Kis proceeds by means of dreams and indirect glances. The father is grandiose and manic; the son sensitive and worldly. Well-observed, complex characters are not always enough to sustain a novel. Here, they are.

The Physicists

Friedrich Durrenmatt's two-act play addresses the problem of scientific knowledge running ahead of the political and moral world's ability to integrate it. Three men in a madhouse believe themselves to be Newton, Einstein, and an interlocutor of King Solomon. Abstraction and absurdity are a potent mix.

The Map and the Territory, Take Two

Here's my review of Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, published in the Tampa Bay Times:

Has Michel Houellebecq mellowed? The French novelist whose earlier works could strip paint with their scathing social commentary, explicit sex and crushing gloom takes up a brush instead in The Map and the Territory to paint a muted and glowing portrait of an artist.

Set mostly in the near future of around 2015, the novel follows the career of Jed Martin, a motherless, delicate and isolated French painter who makes his name, and the beginnings of his fortune, when he hits on the idea of photographing Michelin road maps. As the title of his exhibit explains, “The map is more interesting than the territory.” For Martin, beauty in art is secondary, although his photographs are hailed as such. Most importantly, he says, “I want to give an account of the world.”

That has also been Houellebecq’s work as a novelist, so when Martin needs text for an exhibition catalog, whom better to turn to than … Michel Houellebecq? The author winks from beyond the page when his fictional double first appears to modest praise from Martin’s father: “He’s a good author, it seems to me. He’s pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society.”

But it’s not all bouquets. At a meeting with Martin, the novelist “stank a little, but less than a corpse” and “looked like a sick old turtle.” Houellebecq complains that his life has become “one endless scratching session” because of his athlete’s foot. “I’m rotting on the spot and no one gives a damn.”

What could have been a gimmick is instead one of the most endearing aspects of this fascinating novel. Houellebecq and Martin become, as much as two isolated people can, friends. To pay him for the text, Martin paints a portrait of Houellebecq with wild voodoo eyes. It will eventually be worth 12 million euros.

Over the course of the novel the author sticks his nose into all kinds of subjects, from architecture, police work,  bichons frises, gastronomy and the Pre-Raphaelites to euthanasia, consumerism (an “endless wandering between eternally modified product lines”), Audis and video equipment.

And Houellebecq hasn’t lost his touch with the one-liner. Martin finds one of his subjects as difficult to capture “as a Mormon pornographer.” A restaurant’s discreet waiters “operated in silence, as if in a burn unit.” Houellebecq himself (the fictional one) dismisses Picasso’s work as “priapic daubing.”

In a previous novel, Houellebecq wrote: “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.” In this one, he writes: “It doesn’t amount to much, generally speaking, a human life.”

Houellebecq’s world is a gloomy old place, for sure, but there’s a measure of joy to be had in picking it apart and examining the pieces.

Bookart #1

One of the pleasures of collecting books is discovering cover art. Art deco and other designs from the 1920s and 30s are especially attractive. Here's a paperback edition of Thais published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1931. The transformation of Thais, color scheme, typeface — everything works, simply and elegantly.